150th Anniversary of the Alaska Treaty of Cession.
March 3-October 22 Polar Bear Garden exhibition at the Anchorage Museum opens to the public with special emphasis on the famous Leutze painting, which depicts the negotiation of the Alaska Purchase, and the statement about our company InterBering, opened to lobby for rail construction across the Bering Strait.

August 25, 2010

The Bering Strait tunnel project will be on the agenda of the November G20 summit in South Korea, Russian Federation Council member Aslambek Aslakhanov told Novosti in a live interview aired yesterday on the agency's English service. While political issues have prevented construction of this project to date, Aslakhanov said, the G20 will be hosted by South Korea this year, and "as far as we know, our South Korean colleagues will put this project on the agenda." Both Aslakhanov, who was an adviser to Vladimir Putin as President, and geography expert Alexander Bgatov, emphasized the critical role of this project for the industrial development of the entire region, by linking four continents.

Lyndon LaRouche, the world's leading proponent of this great infrastructure project, on Aug. 9 spoke of its role in a worldwide NAWAPA project. To deal with such crises as the recent drought in Russia, LaRouche said, there must be close collaboration between the United States and Russia, and then other nations as well. "NAWAPA, a terraforming project which will open the way toward realization of the Bering Strait Project linking the Americas and Eurasia, is a key ingredient in that."

Aslakhanov, who represents the Siberian region of Omsk, said that in the Russian government, "the overall attitude is positive" to the Bering Strait tunnel project. "One main advantage," he said, "will be creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs," as well as the "opportunity to build new houses, whole new communities, and develop industry and the whole region." It will also provide access to new mineral projects.

In 1997, the Russian government had held a conference, where it was agreed to actively pursue the project, and all the relevant documents had been signed. But "political change" got in the way, Aslakhanov said. It is now back on the agenda. "We need to show the political will to translate the project into reality," he said.

There is opposition: some economists doubt the economic viability of the project, "but they are too young to see the big picture; they only consider the project as such, without thinking about the industrial and regional development the project could bring," he said. Most of the leading Russian and foreign economists and experts believe the project is "very promising." It would take 10-12 years to complete, and pay for itself in another 10-12 years.

Claims that it will be a net loss, are "incomprehensible," he said, since the tunnel "would connect four continents and would spur the development of several regions in this country." Many countries are interested in building this project, and the prospect of earning solid dividends from it.

Bgatov pointed out that construction of the tunnel, the idea of which is over 100 years old, was prevented first by the Russo-Japanese war, then the October Revolution, and other events. In the 1990s, he said, a group of specialists from the U.S., Russia, and the U.K., set up a non-profit corporation to study the project, and this group concluded that it had been known since 1902, that it was feasible. They have already done many studies of the technological background.

The project has "great potential"; the concept has gone beyond a railroad tunnel to the "construction of a major transport route," which would include high-speed electric trains, an eight-lane highway, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, fiber optics and other infrastructure.

The major impact, Bgatov said, will not be having the railroad itself, but "the project's influence on the development of the regions through which it will pass. We cannot even calculate what that will be," he said, but it will be "enormous." Economists claimed that the Trans-Siberian Railroad would not pay for itself, but it did in so in only six years! Beyond that, it made Russia a continental nation: "Without the Trans-Siberian, our borders would be very different today," Bgatov said.